COURSE of the MONTH

Oracle OVM Virtual Machine Backup script help

First off you have to understand I just inherited a Oracle OVM environment. I am more of a VMware ESXi guy so I know how ESXi operates. I was recently told (yesterday) that we do not have a backup and restore solution in place for the Oracle environment, so this includes the Oracle OVM manager environment, several production and non-production VMs as well as our Oracle OEM environment which is currently configured as an Oracle VM.

So until a real Certified Oracle backup software solution can be found and purchased, I need help designing a backup script for handing our Oracle OVM environment virtual machines.

Since I am trying to do this in pieces (for my understanding), I need help on the Part 1 piece.

So far I have been able to get part of section 1A done. Just need to clean it up to just show the OVM_simple_name as a single string (to be used by the backup script to create the directory and direct the backup img files there once created).

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Problem is that Oracle has either been unwilling or unable to provide a backup solution vendor that is considered "Oracle certified", so I am having to go the route of backing up the OVM as a whole as well as the individual VM images. Problem is that Oracle's Xen throws the virtual disks all over the place and doesn't keep them all in the same directory like VMware ESXi platforms do with datastores.

If it was my option, I would convert all of the Oracle VMs into VMware ESXi OVFs and migrate them over to ESXi. At least Veeam's backup solution works for ESXi platforms.

vm_info --- Get a VM info (which will include the disk information)
vm_list --- Get a list of VMs

the free ose version has equivalent features using the virtualbox command.
both feature a webservice that can be used to perform some of these tasks over the network.

note that performing an scp of the disk's vm while it is running will produce unpredictable results (but most likely not working ones) so you need to pause, clone, or snapshot the machine if you want to copy the disk's contents

also note that if iscsi disks are mounted inside the guests, ovm does not know about them

Oracle support would never give us an actual answer for a "certified" backup platform for the OVM environment, so they suck in that regard. So I am going to try the OVM CLI first for the short term needs then work on converting the OVM actual VMs over to ESXi VM format. We discovered that Symantec's Backup EXEC universal client for Linux platforms can actually be used on the Oracle VM instances then through the GUI, do a restore of the data profile on an ESXi VM so we won't have to do V2V conversions.